worst since Chernobyl

And in Japan, of all places, already the only country to be bombed with atomic weapons:

“The sudden turn of events, after an explosion Monday at one reactor and then an early-morning explosion Tuesday at yet another — the third in four days at the plant — already made the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station the worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl reactor disaster a quarter century ago…

‘We are on the brink. We are now facing the worst-case scenario,’ said Hiroaki Koide, a senior reactor engineering specialist at the Research Reactor Institute of Kyoto University…

‘It’s way past Three Mile Island already,’ said Frank von Hippel, a physicist and professor at Princeton. ‘The biggest risk now is that the core really melts down and you have a steam explosion.'”